Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth by Robert Poole

In 1944, V-2 rockets produced by the Nazi war machine lofted 1-ton warheads high into the atmosphere before dropping them on Allied cities. Two years later, rockets of the same make and model were lifting off from the New Mexico desert. This time they were carrying cameras.

Robert Poole’s Earthrise is an extended study of humanity’s experience of viewing Earth from outside the planet. The 1946 V-2 launches resulted in the first-ever photographs that looked down upon Earth from the thin blackness of space. Poole’s book examines this and other key moments in the history of looking at Earth. At the book’s center—or at least on its jacket photo, in its title, and throughout its first chapter—is Earthrise, the photo taken by the crew of Apollo 8 of their home planet climbing above the lunar horizon.

Poole’s history begins long before the New Mexico V-2 shots. He reaches back to ancient writers who imagined how the Earth might look from far away. Plato, for instance, suggested Earth seen from afar would appear purple, golden, white, and would glimmer in “colors more numerous and beautiful than any we have seen.”

If pre-spaceflight thinkers could not develop an accurate picture of Earth’s appearance from space, they nevertheless anticipated something else with remarkable prescience: the feeling of being in space. Poole presents numerous accounts of ancient writers suggesting that looking down upon Earth from afar would produce in the viewer a sense of insignificance and a wholly new perspective. A Cicero character, upon seeing the planet, says, “The Earth seemed to me so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface.” In a fable, Syrian author Lucian has a character share a similar sentiment: “I was especially inclined to laugh at the people who quarreled about boundary lines. . . . The cities with their population resembled nothing so much as ant hills.”

These characters were experiencing an effect similar to that reported by astronauts many centuries later. The phenomenon is so common it has a name: the overview effect. Since the 1960s, some astronauts have said that seeing the Earth from outside, in all its fragility, had a deep impact on their outlooks and attitudes. My favorite account of this comes from Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

Poole draws a line between the ability to see the planet from space and later social developments in environmentalism, such as Earth Day. The images of Apollo, including both Earthrise and Apollo 17’s Blue Marble, became emblematic of environmental movements. They remain so in the 21st century—one of the central images in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is the Apollo 17 shot of the full Earth.

The social and philosophical elements of space photography are certainly interesting, but going into the book I was hoping that Poole would also detail some of the technical aspects. After all, technology directly enabled images from space—if the rocket doesn’t go, you’re not getting those pretty shots of Earth from high above. Happily, Poole dedicates a fair amount of space to the people, equipment, and procedures involved in photography throughout the space program, including on Apollo. We learn how astronauts trained to take photos in space, how the images were developed back on Earth (very carefully, it turns out), and how they were disseminated to the public.

One of the central figures in this part of the history is Richard Underwood, one of the leaders of photography for the Apollo program. Underwood is a colorful figure who often found himself at odds with mission scientists and engineers. To them, cameras were considered frivolous additions to missions. Underwood rages at this idea:

I used to scream at the engineers in meetings . . . “You’re going to spend $50 billion on everything else, yet you don’t want to spend $20,000 on cameras . . . without those pictures, we’ll have no idea of what happened up there. You can load thousands of books with all this computer data about our trips to the moon, shove them in a library, and no one will ever read one.”

Poole, a British academic, has produced a book that packs an impressive depth and breadth of research into its 200 pages. For a writer whose primary focus isn’t space flight, he does an excellent job of getting his facts straight and his terminology on-point. I imagine that such errors grate only die-hard Apollo nerds, but as one of those people, I was glad he took the time to apprehend all the relevant details of the crewed spaceflight program.

Poole makes good choices in structuring his book, too. He includes lots of lengthy quotes, letting his subjects speak for themselves instead of paraphrasing. Considering the importance of eyewitness accounts and personal reflections in this history, it’s a wise choice. Of course, the biggest potential misstep in producing the book would have been leaving out a photo section, and Poole doesn’t disappoint here. Well-printed photos on glossy paper are found at the center of the book, giving the reader a chance to see many of the major images discussed in the text. With the importance of photography in the narrative, I might have liked to have seen an even more extensive photo section, but what’s here is good.

I found Poole’s writing to be quite clear, and the book was a quick, enjoyable read. A few sentences here and there started to take on the overlong, overwrought, hard-to-parse quality of the worst academic writing, but these don’t detract from the overall work.

In Earthrise, Poole has delivered a short, lucid examination of the history of humanity’s ability to look at its home planet, as well as the effect that this experience has had on individuals and social movements. I felt the book did a wonderful job of speaking to both the philosophical and technical aspects of the topic, making it a good pick for readers inclined in either of those directions. And though Apollo is not the book’s only focus, the program’s photos (and the stories behind them) form the book’s backbone, making it a solid choice for an Apollo library.